Since the election President Obama has received a wide range of unsolicited advice regarding his legislative relations as they pertain to his second term agenda and, most immediately, avoiding a plunge over the fiscal cliff. A fair number of the comments, in an echo of the pre-election punditry that ultimately led to Nate Silver selling three billion new books, suggest that the key to legislative success is not really policy, but personality. If only Obama were a warmer person, a better schmoozer or for that matter a better golfer, Congress would follow his lead and come to a deal. Much of this should involve hospitality, and better yet, food.

Funny he doesn't mention the 18 million he made from an initial 100,000 investment in global crossing when he got preferred shares, pennies on the multiple dollars the rest of paid. He is a genius. Just like Hillary's cattle futures investment talent. (Of course H Bush made a bundle as did Colin Powell in global crossing - before it turned into "global double crossing" - as GG would later call it - and went bust and the CEO went to jail). It pays to have connections. It pays to go into politics:

This 50-something, white, conservative Republican wishes to thank America’s youth for sacrificing their financial futures and standard of living so that boomers, such as my wife and I, can look forward to a long and comfy retirement, which we could easily have afforded on our own. Now we have the youth as our guarantors and providers of a little something extra.

As reported by the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research, Americans aged 18 to 29 voted 60% to 36% for Barack Obama. Prior to Obama’s re-election, I believed that it was morally wrong for my generation to pass a crushing national debt on to the next one.

The debt will top $20 trillion before Obama moves out of the White House, and it will include spiraling retirement-related costs that the administration has shown zero interest in bringing under control, largely driven by baby boomers piling into the Social Security and Medicare systems.

With the president’s electoral crushing of Mitt Romney, my overriding sense of morality and guilt have vanished. Thank you, kids!

I reposted this with a better description in: 'The Way Forward'. As a political matter, I would just say it is a great description of the difference between the way liberals and conservatives look at things.

Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska and Barack Obama's choice to be secretary of defense, served with honor as an infantryman in Vietnam and was wounded twice. This fact, a tribute to Mr. Hagel's personal courage, will now be trotted out repeatedly as proof of his fitness to serve in high office.

If the standard by which our prospective secretaries of defense should be judged is prior military service, neither Edwin Stanton (Lincoln's secretary of war) nor Henry Stimson (FDR's) would have passed the test. Robert McNamara and Don Rumsfeld would have. But I digress.

Perhaps the better test for Mr. Hagel is political courage, something he's supposed to possess in spades. "He had the courage to buck his own party on the Iraq War," says White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Tweets David Axelrod: "He's tough, courageous, sensible & able to withstand political pressure to do what's right for USA. What we need!"

OK, let's see about that.

In 1998, when it was politically opportune for Mr. Hagel to do so, he bashed Clinton nominee James Hormel for being "openly, aggressively gay," a fact he said was disqualifying for becoming ambassador to Luxembourg. Late last year, when it was again politically opportune, Mr. Hagel apologized for his gay-bashing. Mr. Hormel accepted the apology, while noting that "the timing appears to be self-serving." Yes it did.

In 1999, when the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy was broadly popular, Mr. Hagel scoffed at the idea of repealing it: "The U.S. Armed Forces aren't some social experiment." Since then, Mr. Hagel has offered his opinions on many subjects in scores of published articles. In not one of them did he recant or amend his views on gay issues. His public about-face only occurred when his name made Mr. Obama's shortlist for secretary of defense.

In 2002, also when it was overwhelmingly popular, Mr. Hagel voted for the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. The lack of political courage is especially noteworthy here, because Mr. Hagel was, in fact, prescient in warning his Senate colleagues that "imposing democracy through force in Iraq is a roll of the dice."

Yet as the inimitable David Corn notes, "Bottom line: Hagel feared the resolution would lead to a war that would go badly but didn't have the guts to say no to the leader of his party."

In 2006, when the war in Iraq had become overwhelmingly unpopular, Mr. Hagel was on the right side of conventional wisdom. "The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq," he wrote in the Washington Post that November. Still swimming with the tide the following year, he called the surge "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

The surge turned out to be George W. Bush's finest hour—a genuine instance of political courage as opposed to Mr. Hagel's phony ones. It rescued the U.S. from humiliating defeat. It gave Iraq a decent opportunity to stand on its feet. It allowed the U.S. to conduct an orderly withdrawal of its forces. And it might have led to a long-term security relationship with Baghdad had the Obama administration not fumbled the endgame. Again there is no public record of Mr. Hagel acknowledging any of this.

Moving forward, in 2008 Mr. Hagel endorsed engagement with Syria's Bashar Assad and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, and he was especially keen on engagement with Iran, enthusing at one point that "Iran had rights for women long before many countries in the world. Women could vote, I actually think before they could vote in America." (He's wrong: Iranian women were enfranchised only in 1963, thanks to the Shah.)

In each case, Mr. Hagel was articulating a view that was exactly in keeping with received Beltway wisdom. In each case, he was subsequently disproved by events. In no case was Mr. Hagel ever held to any kind of account for being wrong. In no case did he hold himself to account for being wrong.

Oh, by the way, in 1995 Mr. Hagel told the Omaha World Herald that his opposition to abortion was total and made no exception for cases of rape or incest—a view that helped get him elected to the Senate the following year. He later voted repeatedly against allowing servicewomen to pay for abortions out of their own pocket, according to the left-wing magazine Mother Jones. Now that Congress has authorized the Defense Department to pay for abortions in cases of rape, it would be worth asking Mr. Hagel if he has evolved on this one, too.

But give Mr. Hagel this: When it comes to expressing himself about Israel, its enemies, and the influence of the so-called Jewish lobby, he has been nothing if not consistent and outspoken. Maybe that's political courage. Or maybe it's a mental twitch, the kind you can't quite help. The confirmation process should be illuminating.===============

There is also the matter of his opposition to sanctions on Iran!!!

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more WSJ:

President Obama on Monday chose Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon, inviting a confirmation brawl over a troubling nominee. The Senate should oblige. The Hagel hearings are an opportunity to have the debate over Mr. Obama's policies and a growing world disorder that we didn't have in the election campaign.

Mr. Obama also said he'll nominate White House counterterror chief John Brennan to run the CIA, joining last month's choice of Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State. Like CIA deputy Michael Morrell, Mr. Brennan is a capable intelligence analyst, but Langley will once again lack senior management without substantial experience in the spy game.

This may further turn the agency away from its traditional and primary duty of collecting and analyzing human intelligence—a weakness that showed up in its failure to know about the threat to U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, for example.

More troubling is the chorus-line worldview of the new Obama security team. In his first four years, Mr. Obama ran foreign policy from the White House more than any President since Nixon. But at least his security team—Bob Gates and Leon Panetta at Defense, Hillary Clinton at State, and Mr. Panetta and David Petraeus at the CIA—had independent political stature and experience. The second-term group is shaping up as a White House echo chamber, less a team of rivals than of dovish loyalists.

That's all the more reason to carefully question Mr. Hagel, who is a nominal Republican but whose views echo the post-Vietnam Democratic Party. In his Monday remarks, Mr. Obama pointed to the former Senator's admirable service in Vietnam as an enlisted man and repeatedly called him "a patriot."

But no one questions Mr. Hagel's patriotism and military service. What matters at the top of the Pentagon, at this moment in history, is how he would deal with today's growing security threats amid Mr. Obama's desire to withdraw the U.S. from its traditional role of world leadership.

Related video. Editorial page editor Paul Gigot on President Obama's nominations of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan as Defense Secretary and CIA director. Photo credit: Getty Images..By largely continuing George W. Bush's antiterror policies and expanding drone missile strikes, Mr. Obama has punished al Qaeda. But this headline-making progress has obscured the more general decline in U.S. influence in the world's hotspots that are likely to become hotter in the second term.

Among the first tasks will be the drawdown from Afghanistan. The Administration has significantly pared back the military's suggestions for a follow-on NATO force after the 2014 handover to Kabul, and little suggests that Mr. Hagel would push back against the White House. Scarred by Vietnam, Mr. Hagel has taken a dim view of America's influence and ability to shape events overseas. He supported the Iraq war before he opposed it and then opposed the successful 2007 surge. He has long urged engagement with Syria's dictator and the terror group Hamas.

Iran will be another test. The President has declared that Tehran won't be allowed to get nuclear weapons and accepted tougher sanctions against Iran. Mr. Hagel opposed sanctions and called for the U.S. to recognize and bargain with Tehran's clerics. So which is it?

According to Mr. Hagel, the U.S. also can't afford and doesn't need the military it has today. Messrs. Gates and Panetta tried to limit the White House demand for defense cuts, but with the election over liberals are again gunning for the Pentagon in order to protect entitlements and diminish the U.S. ability to intervene abroad.

Mr. Hagel has opposed the deployment of missile defenses, since it annoys the Russians. He should be asked if he still believes that, as well as if any new arms deal with the Kremlin must be submitted to the Senate for ratification. He should also be asked to explain Mr. Obama's record and policies in the Middle East, the failed Russian "reset," the proposed pivot to Asia that lacks adequate naval resources, and the inadequate response to China's expanding naval power.

The results of U.S. security policies tend to have a long fuse, good or bad, building for years until some event makes them clear. The Berlin Wall fell after Reagan's successes rebuilding U.S. strength and credibility, while al Qaeda burst into bloody view in 2001 after a decade of treating terror like a law enforcement problem.

On current trends, President Obama's second term is likely to see more global troubles and disarray, and the Senate's job should be to highlight the dangers and instruct the public about the potential consequences of the Hagel-Obama vision of U.S. retrenchment. Whether or not Mr. Hagel eventually wins confirmation, a lengthy fight ought to be a useful education.

Is Chuck Schumer A Friend Of Israel?By DICK MORRISPublished on DickMorris.com on January 10, 2013

Printer-Friendly VersionNow that President Obama has nominated Senator Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary, we will see who the real friends of Israel are. Jews in New York State, in particular, are very interested in whether their Senator -- Chuck Schumer -- has the moxie to stand up against the Hagel nomination.

The litany of Hagel's sympathy for the Palestinians and his willingness to equate Israel's moral position with those of the Hezbollah/Hams terrorists is there for all to see.

Hagel won the praise of Hezbollah in 2006 which said "except for Sen. Chuck Hagel, no one in Congress is willing to stand up to the Israeli Lobby."

Invited to be the keynote speaker at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Hagel said Washington should cultivate "a deeper level of understanding of what's at stake and of what the people -- especially the Palestinian people -- have endured over the last 50 or 100 years."

After an outbreak of suicide/homicide bombings in Israel, Hagel made clear that he believes Israel was, in part, to blame. Saying that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has "essentially stopped the [peace] process," Hagel said "The Israeli government essentially continues to play games...What I fear more today is that desperate men do desperate things when you take hope away. And that's where the Palestinians are today."

Saying "I'm not an Israeli Senator, I'm an American Senator," Hagel complained in a recent interview that "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here [in Washington]."

Hagel has opposed tough sanctions on Iran.

And, in October of 2000, he was one of only four Senators who refused to co-sign a letter to President Clinton expression solidarity with Israel as it was subjected to the repeated terrorist attacks of a new Palestinian intifada. Indeed, Hagel also refused to sign a letter initiated by Senator Joe Biden calling for a re-evaluation of relations with the Palestinian Authority in light of the attacks.

Schumer holds the key to the Hagel nomination. Republicans will oppose his confirmation. If Schumer leads the way, other Democratic Senators from states with large Jewish populations - Nelson and Lautenberg (NJ), Gillibrand (NY), Nelson (FL), and Boxer and Feinstein (Cal) will feel pressure to follow suit.

Chuck Hagel was the one Senate Republican willing to help Barack Obama when he needed it most—in July 2008, as Mr. Obama, then an Illinois senator, prepared to fight Sen. John McCain in the presidential election.

Mr. Hagel, at the time a GOP senator who had already fallen out of favor with Mr. McCain and other Republican Party leaders, agreed to join Mr. Obama on a tour of Iraq and Afghanistan, just weeks before the national conventions. Running against a war hero with long experience in foreign policy, Mr. Obama had never visited Afghanistan and been just once to Iraq.

In an interview with WSJ Washington Bureau Chief, Jerry Seib, Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.) defends the nomination of Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon, saying the former Nebrasksa Senator has integrity and impeccable credentials.

The overseas trip was intended to bolster Mr. Obama's foreign policy credentials and claims to bipartisanship. But through the long plane rides, cramped quarters and endless meetings, Mr. Obama came to see Mr. Hagel as a kindred spirit, as much for his beliefs as his pragmatism, said people who were there. As they relaxed in a Kuwait hotel room trading jokes and talking shop, a senior administration official said, it was obvious the two men "just kind of clicked."

Mr. Hagel's unlikely road from Republican stalwart to apostate to nominee for Secretary of Defense begins in Vietnam and takes a sharp turn at Iraq. The son of a lumberyard worker, he grew up in Ainsworth, Neb., joined the Army's Ninth Infantry Division and in 1968 served as an infantry sergeant in Vietnam. He returned a decorated combat veteran and over the years developed a measured skepticism toward war.

Mr. Obama now seeks Senate approval for Mr. Hagel, 66 years old, who went on to make a fortune early in the cellphone industry before serving two six-year terms in Washington and then stepping down.

The White House faces opposition from Republicans who see Mr. Hagel as a turncoat, a former conservative who by 2006 had become an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war.

Conservatives and some Jewish groups have accused Mr. Hagel of weak support for Israel, based, in part, on past comments calling for negotiations leading to recognition of a Palestinian state. Mr. Hagel's past comments have also called for engagement with Hamas, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group. While in the Senate, Mr. Hagel refused to sign a letter urging the European Union to also label Hamas a terrorist organization.

Pro-Israel groups also have voiced concerns over Mr. Hagel's skepticism over sanctions against Iran. Mr. Hagel has said his record has been distorted. Supporters point to his voting record on behalf of Israel and his co-sponsorship of legislation opposing Hamas. They also have argued that he hasn't opposed military action against Iran but has said the consequences of such a strike must be carefully considered.

Mr. Hagel remains a Ronald Reagan conservative, said his allies, a believer in private enterprise, small government and a powerful military. But they said he also believes the U.S. alone can't remake the world.

"He is quite willing to use power, but there is a sense, an awareness that power has its own limitations, and I think that is right," said John Hamre, the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who serves with Mr. Hagel on the Defense Policy Board, a nonpartisan panel that advises the Pentagon.

Second-Term Cabinet ShakeupPresident Barack Obama will need to fill many key posts in his second term. Take a look at top officials, some of whom are expected to leave.

View Interactive

. More photos and interactive graphics .What is unclear is how Mr. Hagel's views will play out in the coming confirmation battle. Outside groups this week readied campaigns for and against Mr. Hagel, as Republicans ramped up their opposition following Monday's nomination.

"On national security issues, I would say he has changed rather significantly," Mr. McCain said in an interview, adding that he had concerns about Mr. Hagel's nomination. "I still consider him a friend and always will. I believe his service in Vietnam was very honorable. It doesn't have anything to do with the personal aspect of our relationship, it has a lot to do with our divergence on national security and the future of this country."

Looking ahead to Senate confirmation hearings, Ross Baker, a Rutgers University professor who, at one point, advised Mr. Hagel in the Senate, said that after battlefield heroics that earned Mr. Hagel two Purple Heart medals, "there's not much a United States senator can do to intimidate you."

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Tom and Chuck Hagel in Vietnam in 1968..Family members said they believed that Mr. Hagel would find a career in politics ever since he was elected high school class president. He returned home from Vietnam to first work as a reporter for a radio station and then a news-talk anchor, according to the 2006 biography, "Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward."

"I was very Republican, very conservative," said Mr. Hagel in the book.

In 1971, he began working for a Nebraska congressman and six years later moved to the Firestone Co., where he was a lobbyist helping the firm grapple with reported radial tire failures.

In 1980, Mr. Hagel joined Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign and after Mr. Reagan's victory was appointed deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration. He left the following year to pursue business interests with friends, according to his biography.

Mr. Hagel sold his 1979 Buick and cashed life insurance policies to help form Vanguard Cellular Systems.

In those pioneering days, Mr. Hagel was consumed by cellphone technology. "We were talking about Dick Tracy stuff," he said in the 2006 biography. "It will be no wires. It will be video. It will be everything."

Mr. Hagel in demonstrations entertained skeptical onlookers by putting a shoe to his ear and talking, said those who knew him at the time.

Vanguard received Federal Communications Commission licenses to operate cellphone systems in Maine, New York, South Carolina, Florida and elsewhere. In 1998, the company agreed to be acquired by AT&T T -0.29%for an estimated $1.5 billion.

.Mr. Hagel's share of the proceeds made him a millionaire and afforded a pursuit of elected office. He defeated then-Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson in a 1996 Senate race, arriving in Washington as a pro-business, Midwestern Republican.

Mr. Hagel's early record was solidly conservative. He voted to authorize NATO military operations against Serbia in 1999 and, in 2001, backed President George W. Bush's tax cuts.

But rifts between Mr. Hagel and his party emerged after he endorsed Mr. McCain over Mr. Bush in 2000, against the wishes of party elders. Mr. Hagel returned to the fold in 2002 with a vote to authorize war in Iraq, which he came to regret.

"It all comes down to the fact that we were asked to vote on a resolution based on half truths, untruths, and wishful thinking," Mr. Hagel wrote in his 2008 book, "America: Our Next Chapter." He said his vote was intended to authorize military force as a last resort, but Mr. Bush had failed to "exhaust all diplomatic efforts."

As years passed Mr. Hagel came to see the conflict as unwinnable—not unlike the Vietnam War—and he began openly criticizing the Bush administration. In a 2006 newspaper opinion piece, he called for a troop withdrawal in Iraq, a major break with the GOP's leadership.

His views on Iraq had roots in his Vietnam experience, said Bob Kerrey, also a former Nebraska senator and Vietnam veteran.

Mr. Hagel has described the war as "ill-conceived, poorly prosecuted, and unsuccessful." He had served side-by-side in the Mekong Delta with his brother Tom, at different points, saving each other's lives. In March 1968, recalled Tom Hagel, a Claymore mine that had been hanging from a tree detonated above their patrol and "everything was chaos."

"My brother was behind me, I turned around and looked at him," Tom Hagel said. "He was on his back with blood spurting out of his chest." He applied bandages to stop the bleeding.

After returning to combat, the brothers were both wounded a month later when their armored personnel carrier, under attack, hit a mine. Riding in the turret of the vehicle, Tom Hagel was knocked unconscious. Chuck Hagel, badly burned, threw his brother off the damaged vehicle and dragged him to safety.

"From that day on, I was a changed person," Chuck Hagel wrote in his book. "I made myself a promise that if I ever got out of that place and was ever in a position to do something about war, so horrible, so filled with suffering, I would do whatever I could to stop it. I have never forgotten that promise."

Tom Hagel, but not his brother, returned home convinced that U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was ill-advised. They would fight about it during Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings, until their mother forbade the discussion.

"Almost always it would start off as an argument, and then, maybe after a couple beers, fists started flying," said Tom Hagel.

Years later, after listening to tapes of former President Lyndon B. Johnson saying in private conversations that while he didn't think the war could be won, he wouldn't end it, Tom Hagel said his brother changed his mind on Vietnam.

Chuck Hagel declined to be interviewed for this article.

"He would make certain, if we go to war, it will be our last option," said Tom Hagel. "But on the other hand anyone who thinks he is a pacifist is a fool. If he was directed to conduct a war, he would go full throttle, no doubt about it."

Mr. Hagel's outspoken stance on the Iraq war caused a split with Mr. McCain. The Arizona senator had been one of Mr. Hagel's few remaining Republican allies until the debate in January 2007 over sending more troops to Iraq. Mr. McCain was the surge's loudest Senate supporter. Mr. Hagel called it "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

Mr. McCain said Mr. Hagel was profoundly wrong to oppose the Iraq surge and has never acknowledged that error.

"Sen. Hagel became more and more strident and outspoken about his opposition to the surge, but it wasn't just the surge, it was sanctions on Iran, it was many of the public statements he made that were harshly critical of President Bush," Mr. McCain said.

Richard Burt, a former ambassador to Germany under Ronald Reagan, said GOP criticism of Mr. Hagel reflects divisions within the Republican foreign policy establishment. Mr. Hagel was a throwback to a conservative foreign policy advocated by former President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, he said, "where you aren't trying to remake the world as the liberal interventionists and the neo-cons want to do. Chuck Hagel is a realist."

Mr. Obama served with Mr. Hagel on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, alongside Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, now the president's nominee for Secretary of State. As a junior senator, Mr. Obama mostly listened.

"Hagel's questions in these hearings were sharp, they were insightful," said a senior administration official. "That is what drew Sen. Obama."

The connection led Mr. Obama to invite Mr. Hagel on the 2008 trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Obama, who had been criticized during the presidential campaign for not making more visits to U.S. war zones, sought both the perspective of a military veteran, said people close to the president, as well as the political benefit of a Republican on the trip.

While Sen. Hagel took no sides in the 2008 race, the trip for many Republicans was a de facto endorsement that gave Mr. Obama the appearance of bipartisan support.

Mr. Obama's overseas trip was unusually small, made up of a few staff members accompanying Mr. Obama, Mr. Hagel and Mr. Reed. The three senators met with President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and toured Iraq. They shuttled on military aircraft from Basra, the heart of the Shiite south, to Baghdad and the Anbar province. Gen. David Petraeus, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, gave a private helicopter tour of the war zone.

Messrs. Hagel and Obama found they shared similar analytical approaches over the course of the trip, said current and former officials, particularly in assessing war-zone strategy. A State Department cable summarizing the meeting with Mr. Karzai described Mr. Hagel and Mr. Obama as pressing the Afghan leader on corruption, drugs and the influence of Iran. During the meetings, Mr. Reed said, Mr. Hagel and Mr. Obama "had a natural rapport."

At a stop in Kuwait, Messrs. Obama and Hagel ran into each other in a hotel suite used for secure communication. Mr. Hagel was still in his travel clothes; Mr. Obama in his workout gear. They talked more than an hour, seated face to face in hotel chairs. "It was a very personal conversation, just between the two of them," recalled one observer. "It was two men at ease."

"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity." --George Washington

Insight

"Limited as are the powers which have been granted, still enough have been granted to constitute a despotism if concentrated in ... the Executive branch. ... The tendency of power to increase itself, particularly when exercised by a single individual ... would terminate in virtual monarchy. ... The tendencies of ... governments in their decline is to monarchy. ... The spirit of faction ... in times of great excitement imposes itself upon the people as the genuine spirit of freedom, and, like the false christs whose coming was foretold by the Savior ... impose upon the true and most faithful disciples of liberty. It is in periods like this that it behooves the people to be most watchful of those to whom they have entrusted power." --William Henry Harrison, March 4, 1841 inaugural address

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious." --Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

Opinion in Brief

"For foreigners, the only thing nuttier than watching the way we elect our Presidents is watching the way we inaugurate them. For a nation that wears its egalitarianism not just as a badge of honor, but (as we saw this past November) almost as a requirement for office, the pomp and circumstance involved in a modern U.S. Presidential inauguration would have moved Louis XIV to modesty. ... Too many balls, tickets are too expensive, only the rich and connected can get into the really good stuff ... and so on." --columnist Rich Galen

Faith & Family

"The Rev. Louie Giglio, designated to give the benediction at this year's presidential inauguration, has withdrawn, under apparent pressure, after the surfacing of remarks he made, some 25 years ago, about the sinfulness of homosexuality. ... One wonders if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday coincides with this second inauguration of America's first black president, would not himself wind up today pushed off the stage because of his Christian convictions. A hint of how to think about this may be gleaned by visiting the new memorial in Washington, D.C., honoring King. Visiting the memorial, what immediately struck this black Christian was the complete absence of any hint that King was a Christian pastor, who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and who led a movement animated and inspired by biblical conviction and imagery. ... In King's famous letter written in 1963, while locked in a jail in Birmingham, Ala., beginning with the salutation 'My fellow clergyman,' he asks the question, 'How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?' The answer given by King was this: 'A just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.' Would a law such as the one forcing the evangelical Christian owners of Hobby Lobby to pay for contraception and abortion inducing pills of employees, and exposing them to fines of $1.3 million per day for noncompliance -- qualify as 'just' under Dr. King's definition? Would the Rev. Dr. King be ejected from the stage of this president's inaugural if he called this law, produced by this administration, unjust?" --columnist Star Parker

Martin Luther King Jr.

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." --Martin Luther King Jr.

Today the once-noble Democrat Party has turned the wisdom of MLK, one of their most revered iconic figureheads, on its head. Perhaps King's most remembered words are these: "I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." However, Democrat Leftists now interpret this as, "I have a dream that my children will one day be judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character."Read more on what Martin Luther King has come to symbolize for the Left.

Re: The Left

"Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. ... Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries. The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today. Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. ... But who cares about facts, when you are on a liberal crusade that makes you feel morally superior?" --economist Thomas Sowell

Inspiration

"In the debate over abortion in the United States, two women's names appear more frequently than any others: Jane Roe and Mary Doe, the plaintiffs in the companion 1973 Supreme Court cases that legalized abortion in the country. ... [A] woman named Sandro Cano has quietly issued a media release on a Christian newswire service calling for the two Supreme Court cases to be overturned. This in itself might seem unremarkable, until you learn Cano's other name: Mary Doe. Yes, that Mary Doe. ... While the better known Roe v. Wade struck down all state restrictions on abortion pre-viability, Doe v. Bolton extended the right to abort through all nine months of pregnancy. But Cano has since claimed that the whole foundation of Doe v. Bolton was a lie: that she never actually wanted nor requested an abortion and that she was tricked into signing an affidavit about abortion in the process of filing for divorce from her husband and seeking to regain custody of her other children. ... In 2003, Cano launched legal proceedings to try to overturn the case that bears her name. ... But while her attempt to have the case reheard failed, this hasn't stopped her from working to overturn the case in other ways. ... Meanwhile, another women, Norma McCorvey, briefly captured headlines during last year's election cycle when she released a pro-life ad featuring graphic pictures of aborted children and accusing President Obama of 'killing babies' by his support for abortion. Most won't recognize McCorvey's real name, but will instantly recognize her pseudonym: Jane Roe. Yes, that Jane Roe. Though McCorvey worked as an abortion activist for years after Roe v. Wade was handed down, she announced a conversion to the pro-life cause in the mid 1990s. ... In 2003, Norma filed to re-open Roe v. Wade, a petition that was dismissed. Much like Sandra, however, Norma continues to speak out about her involvement in the case. 'I'm 100 percent sold out to Jesus and 100 percent pro-life,' Norma writes in a testimony published on her website. ... To many it will come as a shock that neither of the two women whose names are practically synonymous with legal abortion in America actually had an abortion, and that both are now passionately pro-life and have dedicated their lives to trying to overturn the cases that bear their names." --LifeSiteNews' John Jalsevac

Culture

"For decades, ultrasound has had the power to convey the beauty and reality of human life before birth. Conveying that power, the London Daily Mail newspaper ... reports on the story of a mother who rejected abortion and chose life for her baby after seeing him smile in an ultrasound. Katyia Rowe was told her baby would never be able to walk or talk, but a real-time ultrasound scan showed him blowing bubbles and waving his arms, so she decided to go through with the birth. He died just 9 hours later, but she is very glad she chose life instead of abortion. ... 'Katyia, 26, a training administrator, said: "We were devastated to be told our son's brain abnormalities were so severe they were life limiting we should consider a termination. Further scans were arranged to asses the extent of his disabilities but when I saw him smiling and playing inside me I knew I couldn't end his life. ... I had never considered myself particularly maternal but now I wanted nothing more than to care for my son and give him the best quality of life possible. ... As he grew bigger I could see his little feet and hands prodding through my bump when he wriggled. He may not have been born but he was already our son and I took each movement as a sign we had done the right thing."'" --LifeNews' Steven Ertelt

Essential Liberty

"President Obama put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of [a gun control] task force. Biden calls his gun control effort a 'moral issue.' Does Biden suffer from selective morality? For him, same-sex marriage and abortion don't appear to be moral issues, as they are for his Catholic church, but gun control is. The loss of liberty always begins at the extremes, but it won't stop there. Radicals won't be satisfied with outlawing one type of gun. ... The Second Amendment was written to protect citizens from tyrannical government and to preserve our liberties. It's not primarily for the protection of hunters and target shooters, though they are included. Those politicians who wish to ignore the Constitution are the ones who need to be controlled, not law-abiding gun owners." --columnist Cal Thomas

Obama's State of the UnionFebruary 13, 2013 The Foundation"For it is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger, when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion." --Alexander HamiltonNeoCom SOTU Address

Last night, Barack Obama delivered his latest NeoCom State of the Union Address. Below are the lowlights from his speech:"Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion -- mostly through spending cuts, but also by raising tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. As a result, we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances. ... Already, the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health care costs. ... Let me repeat -- nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. ... [F]or the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Yes, it's true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods -- all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science -- and act before it's too late. ... But if Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy. ... Tonight, let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. ... Today, the organization [al-Qa'ida] that attacked us on 9/11 is a shadow of its former self. ... As long as I'm commander in chief, we will do whatever we must to protect those who serve their country abroad, and we will maintain the best military in the world. We will invest in new capabilities, even as we reduce waste and wartime spending. We will ensure equal treatment for all service members, and equal benefits for their families -- gay and straight. We will draw upon the courage and skills of our sisters and daughters, because women have proven under fire that they are ready for combat. ... [T]onight, I'm announcing a non-partisan commission to improve the voting experience in America. ... Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because they are tired of being outgunned. Each of these proposals deserves a vote in Congress. If you want to vote no, that's your choice. But these proposals deserve a vote. Because in the two months since Newtown, more than a thousand birthdays, graduations, and anniversaries have been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun." --Barack ObamaPost Your OpinionEditorial Exegesis"[Obama's] speech gave every indication that he remains a hostage to the superstition that we can spend our way to national prosperity -- or that we can pass laws that will force employers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other businesses to spend our way to prosperity for us. ... In reality, the state of our union is this: The United States is today $6 trillion deeper in debt than it was before Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. That represents an increase of 57 percent in just four years. Put another way: Out of every dollar the country owes in government debt, 36 cents was acquired under the Obama administration. The state of our union is this: Today there are more than 4 million fewer Americans working than there were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president -- not including those who have retired. ... The state of our union is this: Economic growth is weaker than it has been during any recovery in recent memory; in fact, the economy shrank in the last quarter. ... The state of our union is this: Incomes are lower today than they were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. ... The president boasted that a decade of war is coming to an end. It is, and a new decade of war is beginning. He boasted that al-Qaeda is decimated, but that news has not reached Benghazi or most of North Africa. So the state of our union also is this: North Korea sets off nuclear weapons with impunity. Iran seeks them without fear. Islamists slaughter our diplomatic personnel while the president's national-defense team keeps bankers' hours. ... The president's confrontational, hectoring, and highly ideological speech ought to be a wake-up call to the country. The Republican majority in the House is the only real check on his power. Supplementing that check with a Republican majority in the Senate is imperative. Even through all of President Obama's obfuscations, that much is clear." --National ReviewUpright"I think the mindset of this administration was revealed in one particular line that, I must confess, almost escaped my attention. Quote: 'I'm also issuing a new goal for America.' The particular goal in question was to reduce energy-waste in homes and businesses. Think, however, about the quoted statement. Leaving aside the fact that it sounded like a decree issued from on high, the president's words are emblematic of the top-down approach to the economy and society that's characteristic of all instinctual dirigistes. In political terms, it also reflects a failure to grasp that America was never supposed to be about the government decreeing goals that we're all obliged to get behind." --Action Institute research director Samuel Gregg"In sum, we must 'protect our children' and therefore have left them another $5 trillion in new debt. After five years of these soaring hope-and-change speeches, there are the same three themes I think will keep reverberating: Obama's soaring rhetoric bears not much resemblance to the reality of the present tough times here and abroad; no one in the administration or the media will go back to see whether last year's similar utopian ideas ever worked or even saw implementation; and the majority of listeners to the speech either probably believed every word -- or were angry at anybody who did not." --historian Victor Davis Hanson"As supporters of individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free markets, too often our candidates and elected leaders rail against the corrosive influence of expansive government without thoroughly explaining why our 'sensible' limited-government approach will actually make people's lives tangibly better -- lifting them from poverty, providing them better education options, and preserving the programs they rely on.... When the president says he wants to 'invest' and we say we want to 'cut,' he is wrong on the substance but right on the politics. We need to take back the terminology, and in doing so, the perception of who's on the high ground." --Pete Hegseth, former Executive Director of Vets For Freedom"The central unacknowledged problem the Republican party faces ... is the failure of its economic message to connect with voters' economic suffering. President Obama gave what I think was a politically effective speech. Voters would come away remembering several new ideas that connect -- like the idea of getting a community-college degree alongside a high-school diploma for free, a federal effort to reduce tuition costs, and of course raising the minimum wage.... The GOP's job is to make President Obama own the economy he created by explaining in a persuasive way why we have no real recovery after four years of Obamanomics -- and then offer a choice, not an echo." --commentator Maggie Gallagher

Demo-gogues"Non Compos Mentis" Award: "We avow the First Amendment. We stand with that and say that people have a right to have a gun to protect themselves in their homes and their jobs, where ever, and ... for recreation for hunting and the rest." --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (Memo to Nan: That would be the Second Amendment and the protection in question would be against a government which no longer comports to constitutional restraints.)Calling all sycophants: "The president and I are going to continue to travel the country, so that [the gun control] we're proposing can't be misrepresented. To be very blunt with you, we're counting on you -- the legitimate news media -- to cover these discussions because the truth is that times have changed." --Joe BidenThe BIG Lie: "There's some information that suggests that some of these [gun] manufacturers build their sales models on an assumption that at least 20 percent of the weapons will get sold illegally." --Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD)Gun grabbers: "It's clear that we need to look at handguns also." --Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) on further gun control -- because it's worked so well in ChicagoDenying the problem: "The fact is, we've had plenty of spending cuts. ... t is almost a false argument to say that we have a spending problem. We have a budget deficit problem." --Nancy Pelosi (We're on pace to increase the national debt by $7 trillion over 10 years.)Chutzpah: "On behalf of Americans everywhere, Michelle and I wish to extend our appreciation and prayers to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Michelle and I warmly remember our meeting with the Holy Father in 2009, and I have appreciated our work together over these last four years." --Barack Obama (Someone should tell him that being sued by the Catholic Church doesn't constitute "working together.")The Democrat Motto: "Don't confuse me with any facts." --Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) at a townhall meetingDezinformatsiaSpeaking truth to power: "I think that the president really feels that the state of the union is stronger for several reasons. One is that he's been winning ever since the election. And he seems to have a working majority now, even in the House. But, also, I think that despite the last quarter of GDP non-growth, that things are looking pretty good for the economy." --Time Magazine's Joe KleinSympathy for the devil: "Are there people in your newsroom, editors who are saying, 'We have to be careful here. It's not simple. This man may have a complaint.'" --MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Los Angeles Times journalist Andrew Blankstein during a live feed as police closed in on rogue ex-cop Christopher DornerPeacenik: "What, people ask, is the alternative to small war, if not big war? And the answer no one ever seems to consider is no war. ... We could be a nation that declares its war over, that declares itself at peace, and goes about rigorously and energetically intelligence and diplomacy and well-resourced police work to protect us from future attacks." --MSNBC's Chris HayesHot air: "Talk about something else that's falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What's coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?" --CNN anchor Deb FeyerickNewspulper Headlines:That's When He Isn't Busy Doing Skeet Shooting: "Obama: 'I Often Search Scripture to Figure Out How I Can Be a Better Man as Well as Better President'" --CNSNews.comTaxes Aren't the Only Thing That's High: "Police Say People Smoking Pot, Doing Taxes at Clay H&R Block" --Daily Mail (Charleston, WV)News You Can Use: "Don't Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine" --Slate.comThat's Why He Married a Ketchup Heiress: "Mayo Too Strong for Kerry" --Setanta.comBottom Story of the Day: "Michelle Obama's Posterior Again the Subject of a Public Rant" --The Washington Post(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto)Village IdiotsUnhinged: "Whether by [Obama] executive order or thru a bi-partisan congress an assault weapons ban needs to be re-instituted. Period!!! Mr. Vice President, do your due diligence when formulating a concise and permanent national AWB plan. ... Gun control is no longer debatable, it's not a conversation, its a moral mandate. Sen. Feinstein, you are doing the right thing in leading the re-institution of a national AWB. The time is now to reinstitute a ban. ... I want you to know that I agree with you 100% on enacting stricter firearm laws." --from rogue ex-LA cop Christopher Dorner's manifesto (Dorner was apparently killed yesterday in a standoff with police.)Snake oil: "The Affordable Healthcare Act is going to be implemented in stages and these things, just like Social Security when it started, Medicare when it started, Medicaid when it started, they all have some difficulty when they started." --Fox News' Juan Williams attempting to explain recent revelations about ObamaCare -- most notably 1. Obama sold it at costing less than $900 billion and the most recent CBO estimate is now $2.8 trillion 2. The cheapest family plan will cost almost $20,000 by 2016 3. Compliance will take 127 million man hours. So, when Juan compares ObamaCare to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he may, inadvertently, be on to something!Nothing to see here: "One of the things that I would like to again try to clear up, and I ask you to please stop adopting the rhetoric of the gun advocates. Chicago does not have strict gun laws." --Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthyWe support, but... "We support the Second Amendment. We aren't trying to take anyone's guns away necessarily. We're just trying to get something that's common sense, a logical reaction to the tragedies that have happened in the past few years." --actor Adam ScottSubmission: "[The] president of the United States is our boss, but he is also -- you know, the president and the first lady are kinda like the mom and the dad of the country. And when your dad says something you listen, and when you don't it will usually bite you on the a$$ later on." --comedian Chris RockShort Cuts"I can't get excited by the question of whether Senator Robert Menendez had sex with a prostitute in Central America. It is her word against his -- and when it comes to a prostitute's word against a politician's word, that is too close to call." --economist Thomas Sowell"The financially struggling US Postal Service announced it will stop delivering mail on Saturdays. Can't wait to find out how many days per week you'll be able to get treatment under Obamacare." --Fred Thompson"Reportedly, President Obama's speech will focus on jobs. Hopefully he'll explain to us why anybody in Congress still has one." --comedian Jay Leno"President Obama allowed his Jobs Council to expire without renewing its charter despite high unemployment and a contracting economy. The members never met anyway. The Jobs Council was only intended to save one job, and now its work is done." --comedian Argus HamiltonSemper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team

The Foundation"The value of liberty was thus enhanced in our estimation by the difficulty of its attainment, and the worth of characters appreciated by the trial of adversity." --George WashingtonInspiration

13-year-old Anna with daughter Josey Ann

"I received an amazing email from Anna, who gave me permission to post her story and her name. ... 'When I was little I was molested for eight years by my stepfather. ... I got pregnant the first time when I was 12. I was scared and told him. He hit me and then loaded me up on drugs, telling my mom that I had been injured while out playing with some other kids. He killed my baby. ... When I was 13, I became pregnant again. This time I did not say anything to him. My mom noticed that my body was changing, even though I was only about two months along at the time, and asked me about it. ... I finally got the courage and told her everything. She immediately packed up my brother, sister, and I and took us to our Aunt's house. From there she called the police. ... In the end, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for molesting not only me but my sister. ... I was told by therapists, friends, teachers, family, and even strangers, that it would probably be best if I had an abortion; but I couldn't. ... It was harder than I have words to describe. But there are some things in life that are worth fighting for, and she was one of them. ... I decided to name her Josey Ann, after a character in a book I had read. On Friday, July 28, 1995, roughly six weeks before my due date, I went into labor. ... Words cannot express the joy I felt when we got to bring her home the day before I started the 7th grade. ... My mom was amazing, she watched my daughter so that I could finish school. I did graduate and was my class historian. I met a wonderful man who loves both me and my daughter, and we now have four children. ... It wasn't until I was 26 that I truly found a relationship with Jesus Christ. A wonderful neighbor of ours showed me how much Jesus loves me. Because He loves us, He gave us free will. My stepfather abused that gift when he abused me. But like Romans 8:28 says, God used something horrible to bring me one of the greatest blessings in my life. ... To anyone who is where I was, please hold on. You can make it, and your child will bring you more joy than you can imagine. It will be hard, but it is worth it.'" --LifeNews' Jill Stanek

Essential Liberty

"I was in surgery when the first Columbine victims arrived in our emergency room. As I was working to improve one child's life, my friends were downstairs trying to save others -- one cracking a chest and another tending a girl whose breast had been partially blown off by a shotgun. Trust me; I get it. ... Trashing our individual constitutional rights is not the answer to mass shootings. ... A society so denied becomes one obsessed not with doing the right thing, but with figuring out how to break the law. The inevitable result of violent misconduct is howling for the state to immediately pass more laws that restrain individual freedom to act, the diffusion of power away from the individual and to the state, and the increased risk that the state will become tyrannical and precipitate violence. When we ask our elected representatives to restrict our rights and our freedom of conduct, we are asking them to diminish our chances of becoming good and happy citizens. There once was a king who had only two laws -- 'Do as you please, and harm no one.' This is the simplest expression of liberty and of good governance. It is also the only regime under which citizens can fully learn the difference between right and wrong." --Patriot Post Grassroots contributor Cameron S. Schaeffer

Opinion in Brief

"Let's take one more step with the cry for stricter gun control laws. What would happen if our lawmakers were able to push through a bill ordering the confiscation of all firearms? Who would they immediately go after? You can bet your life it would be the law-abiding citizen. Why? Because they obeyed the law requiring registration of their firearms, government officials know where they reside and the good citizen will, in all likelihood, offer the path of least resistance. The criminals? Well, the criminals would get a free pass because they did not obey the law. So, it would be gun crime as usual on the streets of Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Washington, D.C., Houston and Los Angeles, while a mentally unstable person loads his guns and plans a mass shooting at a mall, church or school in your neighborhood. Welcome to the real world of Obama, Feinstein, Bloomberg and O'Malley gun control." --Patriot Post Grassroots contributor James H. LilleyGovernment"I think most people are missing the liberal thought pattern which is the biggest threat to our Liberty. The liberal argument to ban ... weapons is based on two and only two arguments. First argument is that 'no one really needs a rifle like the AR-15.' The second is that 'for the safety and common good, it is necessary to remove the right to own a weapon with military type features or a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds.' So let me make something perfectly clear: At no time are we required to justify our 'need' of anything to the federal government. As big of a threat to individual liberty that a ban on some particular weapons is and as bad a president that it sets for further gun grabbing by the federal government, it pales in comparison to the concept that the government can begin to base policy on the government deciding what the American citizen 'needs.' ... Really, when you come to think about it, removing a citizen's rights based on government defined needs is about as good a description of socialism as you can find and in reality, is the best explanation why citizens need the ability to defend themselves." --Patriot Post Grassroots contributor Scott Treichler

Insight

"Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. ... It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation." --President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) (MARC: I really like this one!)

Political Futures

"[T]he emotional heart of the State of the Union comprised three issues: immigration reform, climate change and gun control. ... How can it be springtime for liberalism when liberalism's top priorities aren't the public's top priorities? The remainder of Obama's agenda was fairly pathetic boilerplate. Hike the minimum wage! Redesign America's schools! Manufacturing hubs! Make-work programs! This is supposed to be liberalism reborn? Lame ideas cribbed from a playbook with 60 years of dust on it? Slogans hatched by pols who needed a few more nouns to round out Obama's sentences? Legislative initiatives that will cost Democrats seats in 2014 and beyond? Obama's State of the Union had the lowest ratings in 13 years for a reason -- and it's not that America is excited for a new golden age of liberalism. The momentum Obama feels is the pull of gravity, as he starts his fall." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

For the Record

"The president gives a performance [in his SOTU address], extremely animatedly, head swiveling from left-side prompter to right-side prompter, continually urging action now: 'Let's start right away. We can get this done. ... We can fix this. ... Now is the time to do it. Now is the time to get it done.' And at the end of the speech, nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed, and, after a few days' shadowboxing between admirers and detractors willing to pretend it's some sort of serious legislative agenda, every single word of it is forgotten until the next one. In that sense, like Beyoncé lip-synching the National Anthem at the Inauguration, the State of the Union embodies the decay of America's political institutions into a simulacrum of responsible government rather than the real thing, and a simulacrum ever more divorced from the real issues facing the country." --columnist Mark Steyn

The Gipper

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. ... Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business." --Ronald Reagan

Faith and Family

"A healthy marriage culture helps the gold standard prevail, wherever possible, that children are raised by the parents who brought them into this world. ... The Supreme Court itself has repeatedly noted that marriage and the family are necessary foundations of a free and properly functioning democratic republic. This is why the state, although it did not create marriage, has consistently supported and encouraged its flourishing. In contrast, until very recently, no government in human history has ever officially recognized same-sex relationships as marriages, precisely because they do not further society's important interest in the natural procreation of the next generation of citizens. ... The erosion of marriage and the breakdown of the family in America have unleashed social problems that are all too real and must be remedied. But the remedy will not come by accepting same-sex 'marriage' as valid, necessary, or constitutionally required. Marriage does not need redefinition, but rededication to its core meaning, the union of one man and one woman, and to its core purpose, uniting children to their own mother and father." --columnist Ken Connelly

Culture

"The difference between Barack Obama and [Dr.] Ben Carson couldn't be more stark. Obama feeds class warfare and rails about growing up in America in a single parent home, without ever bothering to thank an America that bestowed him a life of privilege. Carson was goaded on to success by a mother whose motto is: 'Do your best and God will do the rest'. In his poverty-challenged youth, with a mother who steadfastly refused victim status, Carson was reading books, not writing them. Even with all odds stacked against him, Ben Carson went on to turn poverty into celebrated success. Meanwhile, there's a pall cast over [last week's] State of the Union address. It's the Hope & Change Americans see in Mrs. Sonya Carson's little boy, Benjamin Carson." --columnist Judi McLeod

Reader Comments

"Mark, thank you for easing my conscience in your column Obama's Progressive State of Disunion with your admission that you had better things to do than watch the SOTU last Tuesday. I wasn't going to; then I thought I should; then as I watched the Cabinet members file in my husband and I looked at each other and silently agreed that we would rather do something -- ANYTHING -- else. I couldn't allow myself to get worked up (again) over all the blatant lies and deception while the ignorant and sycophantic applaud their Emperor." --Christi in Georgia

"The SOTU address given by the impostor in chief was at best a punch line best delivered by a real comedian. The president has told most of these lies before and he still thinks we are going to believe him. The Democrats make me ill when they attempt to use the bodies of children to promote their anti-gun agenda. And I would remind them that the last time attempts were made to disarm the citizens of this country it didn't go as they planned. I would refer them to the history at Concord, known as 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World.' Oh but I forgot they don't teach History anymore do they?" --Kelly in Blue Springs, Missouri"This disgraceful president uses semantics to convince himself he's not a liar. When he says his proposals won't add one dime to the deficit he isn't lying because it's not one dime, but far more than one. And when he took his oath he figures doing everything he can to undermine the Constitution is the best of his ability since he thinks the Constitution is bad for America." --Reed in Flint, Michigan"We don't have a spending problem? HA! How can Obama, Pelosi, and the other NeoComs actually maintain a straight face while babbling such astoundingly stupid statements? Their insatiable appetite to tax and spend is driving our nation to destruction! Of course that's how they buy their votes. They promise everybody everything, and unfortunately, far too many voters are either freeloaders or completely out of touch with reality. But nothing is free." --Travis in Texas"Let the sequester happen! Something has to wake the Democrats to the fact that the spending has to stop!" --Del Ray in Clearbrook, Minnesota

The Last Word

"Right now, politicians have the power to suddenly decide to tax us all at 100% and then spend the money replacing all of our roads with a high-speed rail system. What keeps them from doing that? Common sense? Cme on, look at the morons we have in government -- Congress is filled with idiots who couldn't run a lemonade stand and who have grand visions to transform the nation. No, the only thing stopping them is that they're divided into two parties who viscerally hate each other. If they ever got along, a big new government overreach like the Patriot Act or a giant boondoggle like Obamacare would be passed every couple weeks. ... We American citizens have nothing protecting us -- except the two-party system. Playing half the government against the other half is the only thing keeping its power in check. ... If we ever see the parties start to get along, we have to come up with some completely made-up issue to keep them fighting, like climate change. ... So right now we should hope for headlines about a bipartisan agreement that was broken up when the senators started to bite each other. Then we'll know our country is safe." --columnist Frank J. Fleming

WEDNESDAY CHRONICLEBeware 'Comprehensive' Immigration ReformApril 3, 2013 The Foundation"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." --James Madison, Federalist No. 62Editorial Exegesis

"Regardless of their respective positions on immigration reform, legislators on both the dovish and hawkish sides of the debate should agree on one fundamental principle: The Nancy Pelosi approach to lawmaking -- pass the bill to find out what's in it -- is no way to go about repairing our defective immigration system. Supporters of so-called comprehensive immigration reform are positioned to rush through legislation in the Senate ... and have been critical of Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions and others who have called for a more thorough (and necessarily more time-consuming) examination of the issues in question. ... 'But we've been debating these issues for decades,' the argument goes. True enough. But we have not been debating the specific legislation under consideration for decades, years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or milliseconds: As of this writing, the text of the bill has not even been finalized, much less made public, and still less been subject to rigorous debate. The distinction is important. Senator Sessions and others are not calling for delay for the sake of delay. They are asking for time to examine thoroughly the specifics of the legislation. ... A right-here-right-now legislative process is an invitation for Republicans to set themselves up for getting rolled by the Obama administration and its congressional enablers. ... Further, there is no reason to conclude that every aspect of immigration reform must be lumped into a single bill: Border security, to take the most obvious example, is worth doing on its own, regardless of independent issues such as the ongoing status of illegal immigrants. The mania for legislative gigantism leads to bad law. ... Congressional Republicans, and Americans at large, should be highly skeptical of the Democrats' attempt to rush through this legislation -- legislation that remains, at the moment, literally a sight unseen." --National ReviewPost Your OpinionUpright"Last Friday, the so-called 'comprehensive immigration reform' effort received a boost when U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka reportedly came to an agreement regarding a guest-worker program. ... The deal creates a new 'W' visa category aimed at low-skill workers. It would allow immigrants to earn the same wages paid to Americans, or an industry's prevailing wages, whichever is higher. Since such wages can vary from city to city, the Labor Department would determine the prevailing wage. The proposal also includes the additional promises of border security, a crackdown on employers who hire illegals, and a 13-year pathway to citizenship for the millions of illegal aliens currently in the country. It's the oh-so-familiar promises that ought to infuriate Americans well aware that the exact same promises about border control and a crackdown on businesses were made when the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed into law." --columnist Arnold Ahlert"On Tuesday, the Associated Press announced that it is banishing the phrase 'illegal immigrant' from its famous stylebook. ... AP explains that it wants to stop labeling people. Hah. This is the same organization that employs journalists who have repeatedly shown naked bias against tea party members, gun owners and pro-life activists. ... I propose that we banish the term 'journalist' when referring to members of mainstream news organizations who pose as neutral news-gathers while carrying out a blatantly ideological agenda." --columnist Michelle Malkin"Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we'd be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality's being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being." --economist Walter E. Williams"Most of the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag. The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single women, for whom the state is a girl's best friend, the sugar daddy whose checks never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a nation's finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far harder to fix." --columnist Mark SteynEssential Liberty"I know that as a Patriot, you will do all within your power to ensure that our society will take back the reins from Big Government. I know that you believe in the enduring truth of our ideas of limited government, free enterprise, and individual freedom, and that they will eventually win the day. Freedom is man's natural state; whenever he's enslaved, all he thinks about is how to become free once again." --Ed Feulner, in a final note as president of Heritage FoundationInsight"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC)"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone." --French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)Demo-goguesNo, shame on Obama for standing on the caskets of children: "The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we've moved on to other things, that's not who we are. ... Less than 100 days ago that happened, and the entire country was shocked. And the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different. Shame on us if we've forgotten. I haven't forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we've forgotten." --Barack Obama"Tears aren't enough. Expressions of sympathy aren't enough. Speeches aren't enough. We've cried enough. We've known enough heartbreak. What we're proposing is not radical. It's not taking away anybody's gun rights. It's something that, if we are serious, we will do." --Barack ObamaJust the beginning: "[T]he Assault Weapons ban and the limitation on the size of magazines, let me say this as clearly as I can: This is just the beginning. We believe that weapons of war have no place on our streets. That's the message that the retired admirals and generals have spoken to us about. The comment one of them used was: 'If you want to learn how to use a semi-automatic weapon, join the United States military, but these are weapons of war.' And we believe there's no rational reason why someone would need a clip that can hold 15, 20, 30, 100 bullets, 100 rounds. We have to do more and we will do more." --Joe BidenApril Fools? "I call upon all Americans to observe this month with programs and activities to improve their understanding of financial principles and practices. My Administration is dedicated to helping people make sound decisions in the marketplace. My Administration continues to encourage responsibility at all levels of our financial system." --Barack Obama, in a declaration designating April "National Financial Capability Month" (Since taking office in 2009, Obama has increased the national debt by 60 percent, or $53,377 per household.)The BIG Lie: "You have a responsibility to honor the Constitution. In fact, we take an oath to do just that, and that is the oath that President Obama is upholding. We weigh equities. Congress passes a bill. It's questionable in terms of constitutionality. There's no question about your oath to the Constitution of the United States.... I think we would all say we're honoring, as the president does, the Constitution." --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

DezinformatsiaLeft-theology: "Now, I'm not suggesting that John and Jesus were getting it on, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if John was gay and not acting sexual [towards Jesus] but just being affectionate, and Jesus was fine with that. Jesus did not say, 'John, get off my chest. Get your head away from me. I'm not gonna sit here with a guy with his head on my chest through an entire meal. I'm a homophobe, I'm scared, I'm...' No, Jesus didn't say that. Jesus just continued to hang out with John." --radio talk-show host Thom HartmannIgnorance: "Easter is the celebration of the resurrection into heaven of Jesus, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life." --New York Times reporter Elisabetta Povoledo (Following the embarrassing gaffe, the Times issued the following correction: "An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus's resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.")Support the troops: "Bear in mind that most veterans did nothing heroic. They served, and that's laudable, but it hardly seems necessary to provide them all with military honors after they have died. In fact, it seems generous enough to provide veterans and their spouses with free space and headstones at a national cemetery." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Bill McClellanDenial: "I think [if] people watch [CNN] more critically and not just listen to what other people say about it -- I won't mention names -- they'll see that it [isn't a liberal news network], and I think one of the things we fix is make sure we have the right balance of voices on CNN. That we have good conservatives, good liberals, experts in all areas. It's a serious news network." --Turner Broadcasting CEO Phil KentNewspulper Headlines:So Much for the Assault Weapons Ban: "Senators Beat Devils in Shootout" --The New York TimesOut on a Limb: "However Court Rules, Gay Marriage Debate Won't End" --Associated PressLongest Books Ever Written: "Why Liberals Are Way, Way Too Obsessed With Income Inequality" --AEI-Ideas.orgShortest Books Ever Written: "What Michelle Obama Can Teach Us About Modern Womanhood" --Globe and Mail (Toronto)We Blame Global Warming: "Melt May Explain Antarctica's Sea Ice Expansion" --BBC websiteWe Blame George W. Bush: "Don't Blame Climate Change for Heavy Rain" --The-American-Interest.comBottom Story of the Day: "Dem Budget Targets Rich" --New York Post(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto)Village IdiotsAnother BIG Lie: "As an absolute matter of fact in my view, and I think many other constitutional experts, there's not a single measure in this package of proposals the president has put forward that in anyway violates the Constitution. In fact, they reflect the president's commitment to our Second Amendment rights." --White House Press Secretary Jay CarneyMade up stats: "There are still thousands of Americans that are being murdered every single day." --Newark Mayor Cory Booker (Booker then followed up on Twitter with multiple corrections: "Just caught myself miss-speaking on ABC. It's hundreds being killed everyday not thousands. Sorry about that." Moments later: "Sorry again, officially it is approximately 30 people murdered every day due to gun violence." You know, whatever.)Blame game: "I come from the city of Chicago. We know we have had a violence problem there. A lot of it has to do with straw buyers arming street gangs. There is no doubt and every law enforcement person will tell you that stronger trafficking laws combined with universal background checks would make a real difference. People are afraid of the NRA and they're trading their jobs for young lives in places like Chicago. And it's a terrible blight." --David AxelrodHollywood hypocrite: "For those who say I'm a hypocrite because I have an armed bodyguard, lets make one thing clear: No one in my employ is allowed to carry a large magazine and NO ONE IS ASKING ANYONE TO GIVE UP THEIR RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS.... And to the bullies who will try to marginalize and discredit me by saying, 'Shut up, you're just an actor,' while they brag about what a great president the ACTOR Ronald Reagan was, who threaten me with the demise of my acting career and much worse, I say SO BE IT!" --actor Jim CarreyIrreverent "worship": "It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling people back, never forward, forgetting that we are called to be a pilgrim's people. ... The captains of the religious right are always calling us back, back, back. For blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet and for immigrants to be on their side of the border." --Rev. Luis Leon's Easter "sermon" for the Obama klan at St. John's Episcopal Church (Somebody get ahold of the IRS and revoke St. John's non-profit status!)Revisionist history: "If Jesus were alive today, he would be more inclined to say, 'you know, I didn't know it all.'" --Rev. Oliver White on why Jesus was wrong about same-sex "marriage"

Short Cuts"So the president of the United States chose a preacher this Easter whose sermon was devoted to claiming that Republicans want to force blacks to ride at the back of the bus again. The Obamas were probably flashing back to the old Reverend Wright days and thinking, 'Man, it's good to be home.'" --radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh"A new report shows that PETA killed 90% of the dogs & cats placed in its animal shelter. President Obama, though, was quick to praise the organization because at least they didn't waterboard." --Fred Thompson"The Weekly Standard cited the Obamas for taking a vacation a month since the year started. They went to Hawaii in January, then he went to Florida while Michelle went to Aspen in February, now she's back in Aspen and the daughters are in the Bahamas. It turns out they cancelled the White House tours so that no one would see that the house is empty." --comedian Argus Hamilton"In a groundbreaking move, the Associated Press, the largest news gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term 'illegal immigrant.' That is out. No longer 'illegal immigrant.' They will now use the phrase 'undocumented Democrat.'" --comedian Jay LenoSemper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team

Of course, this being the Obama tribe—a group of people who promised the most ethical, transparent administration in history; who gave themselves migraines by refusing to hire lobbyists (except when they did); who, during the 2008 primaries, held up the influence-peddling ex-Clintonite Lanny Davis as a shorthand for everything wrong with Washington—there is more than a little anguish over all the newfound riches. “Axe [David Axelrod] thinks all of us are lobbyists,” says one Obama campaign adviser. In conversations with other Obamans, several were willing to damn former colleagues as ethically suspect. (Naturally, they downplayed their own transgressions.)

DAILY BRIEFING SUMMARYFLOP - Fisker Automotive Inc., the troubled electric-car maker, missed its first payment on a $529 million U.S. Energy Department loan.

CONGRESS – According to a recent Politico article, the immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

BENGHAZI - U.S. House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a report on last year's Benghazi attack that blames former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for approving lax security measures and accuses her of seeking to cover up her department's failures.

WHITE HOUSE – U.S. Senate Democrats and Republicans on Tuesday challenged the Obama administration to explicitly spell out its justification for using drones for targeted killings amid growing concerns about unchecked powers of the presidency and Americans' civil liberties.• Meanwhile, the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.• In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, the older brother fell under the influence of a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.GREEN LIGHT - A U.S. federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency has the legal authority to retroactively revoke a water pollution permit for one of West Virginia’s largest mountaintop removal coal mines.

TREND - From Louisiana to Ohio, Massachusetts and Nebraska, bold proposals to upend state tax laws are losing momentum in the face of political squabbles and special interest opposition.

DOMESTIC POLICYECONOMIC NEWSFLOP - Fisker Automotive Inc., the troubled electric-car maker, missed its first payment on a $529 million U.S. Energy Department loan.• Fisker, based in Anaheim, California, was supposed to make the payment on Monday. Fisker had received $192 million in federal loans before a series of problems led U.S. officials to freeze the loan in 2011.• Fisker Automotive Inc. spent more than six times as much U.S. taxpayer and investor money to produce each luxury plug-in car it sold than the company received from customers, according to a research report.• Fisker has spent $1.3 billion in taxpayer and venture capital money, or $660,000 for each car it sold, which cost around $100,000.IN THE DISTRICTCONGRESS - U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana announced plans Tuesday to retire at the end of his term after a career of enormous power and notable independence, producing both collaboration and conflict with fellow Democrats on major tax and health care legislation.• Baucus will join Democratic Senators Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Carl Levin of Michigan, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Tim Johnson of South Dakota in retirement. Republican Senators Mike Johanns of Nebraska and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia also have announced their intention not to seek re-election.CONGRESS - U.S. Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told a gathering outside the Capitol, “There is a big pool of money that really should be paid to help make sure that the United States of America maintains its competiveness, maintains its essential promise to all Americans of liberty and justice for all.”

CONGRESS – According to a recent Politico article, the immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.• Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is pushing back on a report in Politico. Rubio took issue with the analysis for several reasons, pointing to comments made by Republican strategist Karl Rove on Fox News. Rove said that not all 11 million illegal immigrants here today will qualify to become citizens, and not all of the 11 million illegal immigrants are Hispanic. Further, Rove said many green card holders choose not to become citizens and in addition, not all eligible voters – regardless of their backgrounds – turn out to vote.”CONGRESS - Pro-business legislation aimed at helping companies fend off sophisticated foreign hackers sailed through the U.S. House on Thursday despite a White House veto threat and an outcry from privacy advocates and civil liberties groups that say it leaves Americans vulnerable to spying by the military.• Under the legislation, businesses and the federal government would be able to share technical data without worrying about anti-trust or classification laws. The bill also would grant businesses legal immunity if hacked so long as they acted in good faith to protect their networks. The bill is sponsored by Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., the panel's top Democrat.• But privacy advocates and civil liberties groups say the bill would open up Americans' most private online records to the federal government. The bill doesn't include a requirement that companies scrub data of sensitive information like health or credit records before sharing it with the government.BENGHAZI - U.S. House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a report on last year's Benghazi attack that blames former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for approving lax security measures and accuses her of seeking to cover up her department's failures.• Key highlights of the report include: o Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 23, 2013;o In the days following the attacks, White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department; ando Contrary to Administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information. Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior Administration officials.WHITE HOUSE – U.S. Senate Democrats and Republicans on Tuesday challenged the Obama administration to explicitly spell out its justification for using drones for targeted killings amid growing concerns about unchecked powers of the presidency and Americans' civil liberties.• The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.• From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said.• The brothers suspected of planting deadly bombs at the Boston Marathon may have gotten their ideas -- and even instructions on how to make explosives from household items -- from an English-language online magazine that Al Qaeda uses to radicalize and recruit Westerners.• A U.S. official told Fox News that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, built the bombs with instructions from Inspire magazine -- an English-language online magazine published by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.• Investigators say a radical brand of Islam appears to have motivated the two brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon, but say they have found no indication the brothers were associated with any terrorist groups.• In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.• Under the instruction of the Muslim convert, known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.• Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said on Tuesday that law enforcement may have known in advance about the Boston Marathon suspects’ bombing plans.• U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he would have supported police using drones in last week's hunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing. Last month, Paul conducted a nearly 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor after the Obama Administration said in a letter that it was theoretically possible for President Obama to authorize a lethal drone strike on an American citizen under "extraordinary circumstances."• Fox News liberal Bob Beckel had some policy ideas about Muslims on Tuesday's edition of "The Five." Beckel said the U.S. should cut off Muslim students from coming to the U.S. for some period of time so that the U.S. can at least determine who is here and decide whether some of the people here should be sent back home or sent to prison.• The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, Tuesday decried the wave of inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric following the Boston Marathon bombings and the revelation that the suspects in the case are Muslim.• This comes as a United Nations official known for blaming the U.S. for unrest in the Middle East has angered critics again by blaming the Boston Marathon bombings on “American global domination.”• In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks.• MSNBC's Chris Matthews is not that interested in finding out a motive for last week's bombing of the Boston Marathon, but instead focused on prosecuting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old ethnic Chechen who was apprehended by authorities on Saturday.WHITE HOUSE - Amid new concerns about the brutality of illegal forms of abortions, President Obama plans to deliver the keynote address at Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s annual fundraising dinner Thursday.

DROPPED - The United States Attorney has dismissed "without prejudice" all charges against Paul Kevin Curtis, the man initially identified as a suspect after letters that tested positive for ricin were mailed to President Obama and other officials.

WHITE HOUSE - Lawmakers from both parties urged the Obama administration Tuesday to postpone or cancel the furlough of air traffic controllers, with some accusing the Federal Aviation Administration of playing politics as the cuts contributed to airport delays across the country.• A popular annual event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the latest program to fall victim to federal budget cuts. The open house event at the facility in California draws nearly 30,000 guests per year and has been a source of inspiration for younger people considering a career in the field of planetary science.• Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court won’t stop some federal judges from getting cost-of-living increases promised to them by Congress but never paid, a move that could end up increasing the salaries of all federal judges.WHITE HOUSE – According to a 2013 White House report on the costs and benefits of federal regulations, U.S. regulations created in 2012 generated between $14.8 billion and $19.5 billion in annual costs.• But the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University reported, by the Obama administration’s own estimates, the rules it issued in FY2012 alone imposed more costs on the economy than all the rules issued during the entire first terms of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined.• Complying with federal regulations currently cost the U.S. economy more than $1.75 trillion annually.GEORGE W. BUSH - Former President George W. Bush has gained a significant increase in popularity. This increase comes as Mr. Bush is about to open his presidential library for public viewing.• Now, 47 percent of ABC News/Washington Post survey participants say they approve of Mr. Bush’s job performance during his entire eight years in the White House. Fifty percent still say they disapprove — but that’s still an improvement. When he left office, his approval rating was only 33 percent, ABC reported.• The George W. Bush Presidential Center is set to open May 1, 2013.FEDERAL GOVERNMENTHELP FOR TRANSGENDERS - The federal government is spending $152,000 to study “voice therapy” for transgenders, saying it is incumbent to being “accepted as one's preferred gender.”• Meanwhile, First lady Michelle Obama praised federal employees, casting them as overlooked and juggling more duties with fewer resources in a speech Tuesday at the U.S. Interior Department.GREEN LIGHT - A U.S. federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency has the legal authority to retroactively revoke a water pollution permit for one of West Virginia’s largest mountaintop removal coal mines.

EDUCATIONBAD TEXTBOOK - The Jewish Federal of Nashville and a group of outraged parents are calling for a school district to pull a high school textbook they believe promotes bias against Israel.• Meanwhile, Bob and Sarah Fisher were checking their daughter’s homework last week when a social studies assignment caught their attention – it criticized the United States for dropping the atomic bomb during World War Two.GARDEN VARIETY TOOLS - Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed a civil rights lawsuit against a Chicago public school district on behalf of a second-grade teacher who was suspended after he displayed garden-variety tools such as wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers in his classroom as part of a "tool discussion" in his class.

LOCAL ISSUESARIZONA - The Associated Press struck the phrase “illegal immigrant” from its vocabulary, but don’t expect Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to do the same.

TREND - From Louisiana to Ohio, Massachusetts and Nebraska, bold proposals to upend state tax laws are losing momentum in the face of political squabbles and special interest opposition.

WORDS MATTER - Ending a six-year move toward gender neutrality in Washington state law, Gov. Jay Inslee signed the effort’s final piece of legislation Monday, according to news reports.

FOREIGN POLICYMIDDLE EASTSYRIA - U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, currently touring the Middle East for the first time in his new role, was confronted with Israeli evidence that Syria may have deployed chemical weapons against rebel troops.

ASIACHINA - China will build a second, larger aircraft carrier capable of carrying more fighter jets, the official Xinhua news service reported late Tuesday, quoting a senior officer with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy.

SOUTH KOREA - Bill Gates has been accused of disrespecting Park Geun-hye, the South Korean president, after being pictured shaking hands with her, with one hand in his pocket.

EUROPEFRANCE - France's Parliament legalized same-sex marriage and adoption on Tuesday following a divisive debate that had escalated into antigay attacks and street protests.

Flying the Government Skies The 4% FAA spending cut that somehow delays 40% of flights..

As travellers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester—otherwise known as modestly smaller government—by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. We wrote about this human- rights violation on Tuesday in "Flight Delays as Political Strategy," but the story gets worse the closer we look.

Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA's budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can't deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

Ponder this logic, if that's the right word: The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won't arrive on time.

The FAA projects the delays will rob one out of every three travellers of up to four hours of their lives waiting at the major hubs. Congress passed a law in 2009 that makes such delays illegal, at least if they are the responsibility of an airline. Under President Obama's "passenger bill of rights," the carriers are fined millions of dollars per plane that sits on the tarmac for more than three hours. But sauce for the goose is apparently an open bar for the FAA gander.

The White House claims the sequester applies to the budget category known as "projects, programs and activities" and thus it lacks flexibility. Not so: This is a political pose to make the sequester more disruptive. Legally speaking, the sequester applies at a more general level known as "accounts." The air traffic account includes 15,000 controllers out of 31,000 employees. The White House could keep the controllers on duty simply by allocating more furlough days to these other non-essential workers.

Instead, the FAA is even imposing the controller furlough on every airport equally, not prioritizing among the largest and busiest airports. San Francisco's Napa Valley airport with no commercial service will absorb the same proportion of the cuts as the central New York radar terminal, which covers La Guardia, JFK and Newark International, as well as MacArthur, Teterboro, New Haven, Republic and other regional fields.

Anyone who has flown in or out of those terminals knows that they are hardly models of efficiency, and one reason is the pre-modern U.S. traffic control system. The FAA still uses ground radar and voice-based communications that were the best technology the 1950s had to offer. Many planes are now equipped with advanced avionics that enable more direct and precise flight paths, but they aren't allowed to fly these faster, safer routes because the FAA can't track their navigation methods.

For more than a decade the FAA has promised to modernize and make the civil aviation system more efficient and reliable, but the only things it has reliably generated are delays or cost overruns or usually both. The project, known as NextGen, is four years off schedule with no end in sight.

The FAA's troubles are the result of bad management and a lack of oversight, according to multiple Department of Transportation Inspector General audits. A 2011 investigation found that one part of NextGen ran $330 million over budget—or half of the FAA sequester—and then the FAA paid the contractor responsible $150 million in bonuses that were supposed to be an incentive for making the budget targets. The overruns are now approaching $500 million, and that's merely one item.

Meanwhile, ever since Al Gore launched a training initiative to increase the productivity of air traffic controllers in 1998, productivity has continued to fall. A larger workforce is now in charge of a smaller workload as the number of flights has dropped by 23%. As the Inspector General reports, "FAA data suggest that its overall staffing may not be optimal."

A rational government would use the sequester to improve on this sorry record. But instead this White House is responding to the FAA's failures by making the flying experience for millions of Americans even more unfriendly. It is actively creating even more delays, cancellations and missed connections in order to incite a public outcry on behalf of bigger government.

All of this deserves to backfire, and it will if Republicans break from their circular immigration firing squads and explain what Mr. Obama is doing. For all of its rough edges, the sequester is proving to be educational. It is showing Americans how broken so much of government is, and it is revealing how our politicians refuse to distinguish between essential services and needless waste.

Flying the Government Skies The 4% FAA spending cut that somehow delays 40% of flights..

Just thinking aloud, I wonder if the outcome would have been different if an Executive Order such as this had been issued:

All federal government department heads and middle managers who cannot find a 4% efficiency gain in their area of responsibility in this, the fifth year of trillion dollar deficits, will be put under review, reassigned or terminated, and if terminated will receive no pension.

Instead the message from the administration was make this as painful as possible.

"Nice country you got here, be a shame if something should happen to it...." Reminds me of some sort of Chicago thuggery, lucky the public isn't dumb enough to elect people to national office from that cesspool of corruption.

Flying the Government Skies The 4% FAA spending cut that somehow delays 40% of flights..

Just thinking aloud, I wonder if the outcome would have been different if an Executive Order such as this had been issued:

All federal government department heads and middle managers who cannot find a 4% efficiency gain in their area of responsibility in this, the fifth year of trillion dollar deficits, will be put under review, reassigned or terminated, and if terminated will receive no pension.

Instead the message from the administration was make this as painful as possible.

Michael Barone contends that both parties have a problem or two. For the Democrats, it is clustering. Their loss in the house was not only because of re-districting in certain states, but because their support and turnout came from a smaller number of large urban centers.

"Democrats carried the popular vote in black-dominated districts 80%-17% in 2012. They made significant gains in Hispanic-dominated districts, which George W. Bush lost by 11% but Mitt Romney lost by 32%." Republicans had a 52%-46% in the remainder. Only two House Republicans represent Hispanic-dominated districts.

Republicans need to improve their standing with black and Hispanic Americans. Democrats need to improve their standing out-state. "Both parties have reason to feel insecure."

A Bad Joke Becomes RealityMay 15, 2013 The Foundation"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." --James MadisonEditorial Exegesis

"President Obama famously joked in a college commencement address in 2009 that he could use the IRS to target political enemies but of course he never would. It appears that people at the Internal Revenue Service didn't think he was joking. That's become clear since IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner admitted on Friday that the agency targeted conservatives for special tax-exempt scrutiny during the 2012 election season. ... We've also learned that IRS officials knew about this earlier than they have let on. News reports suggest that Ms. Lerner knew about the targeting of conservatives in June 2011, and perhaps as early as 2010. That's a long time before IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman flatly denied any political targeting when he testified at a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing in March 2012. ... Some Democrats took to the airwaves on the weekend to suggest that while the IRS shouldn't have been targeting conservatives, no one was harmed. ... The harm is in fact real, if hard to measure precisely, because any missive from the IRS is enough to chill political spending and speech. ... Oppose the Obama Administration or liberal priorities, and you too can become an IRS target. We're glad to see Congress mobilizing in response, including hearing plans by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus and the House Ways and Means Committee that asked the IRS about this in 2012 and received denials. The subpoenas need to fly as thick as those IRS questionnaires." --The Wall Street JournalPost Your OpinionUpright"Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS' behavior 'inappropriate.' No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the IRS for political purposes is a criminal offense. ... Liberals, whose unvarying agenda is enlargement of government, suggest, with no sense of cognitive dissonance, that this IRS scandal is nothing more sinister than typical government incompetence. Five days before the IRS story broke, Obama ... warned Ohio State graduates about 'creeping cynicism' and 'voices' that 'warn that tyranny is ... around the corner.' Well." --columnist George Will"Can we not at least agree that the Obama administration has established a culture conducive to the type of stereotypical thinking that could lead to this? Didn't the Department of Homeland Security under this administration list right-wing groups as extremists and potential terrorists? Hasn't President Obama himself referred to tea partyers as 'tea baggers'? Haven't other Democrats deliberately depicted tea party groups as violent extremists who are a hair trigger away from armed revolution? Liberals have been trying to vilify conservative talk radio for years now, suggesting that its strong political opinions lead to violence. That is preposterous, but if we were to apply the same type of standard to Obama, we could say that he has personally fomented a climate of hate against conservative groups, such that the IRS targeting was completely foreseeable. Surely, it's fair to hold the president to his own standard." --columnist David Limbaugh"With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. ... The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department's own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the [Benghazi] attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him. After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars." --economist Thomas Sowell"We may be disgusted and horrified by Kermit Gosnell, but we should not be shocked by his crimes. Thanks to the misguided social entrepreneurship of the Supreme Court, abortion is protected as a constitutional absolute, and late-term abortions, grisly as they are, enjoy substantial protection as well. What that looks like in practice is Gosnell's slaughterhouse. We should not pretend that this evil does not extend past the Philadelphia city limits. If you would have an unlimited abortion franchise, then you will have all that goes with it, including the pitiless knife of Kermit Gosnell." --National ReviewEssential Liberty"[L]ook at Obama in this statement in Denver: 'I am constrained ... by the system that our Founders put in place.' That is an unwitting statement of truth. He is constrained. What does constrained mean? It means things I can't do. Why is he even thinking about things he can't do? There are things he wants to do. There are all kinds of executive orders and waiving of the presidential wand to make it happen he would love to do. But the Constitution's in his way, and he wishes it weren't. Be wary, folks, of any politician who talks about the Constitution and uses [phrases] like 'I am constrained.'" --radio talk-show host Rush LimbaughInsight"The right of resisting oppression is a natural right." --President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." --Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 BC)

Demo-goguesThe White (Wash) House: "[T]he day after [Benghazi] happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism. ... The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process, has been a sideshow. ... There is no 'there' there. ... We dishonor [the four Americans killed at Benghazi] when we turn things like this into a political circus." --Barack Obama feigning outrage while perpetuating the myth about CairoBlame game: "It takes funding to protect a consulate. ... Who cut the funds from embassy security? The Republicans in the House, that's who. ... And if it wasn't for the Democrats, it would have been cut more. ... So, I think the Benghazi scandal, in quotes, starts with the Republicans looking in the mirror." --Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)"I genuinely believe that there are actually Republicans out there who would like to work with us but they're fearful of their base and they're concerned about what Rush Limbaugh might say about them. And, as a consequence, we get the kind of gridlock that makes people cynical about government and inhibits our progress." --ObamaGun control stories: "To use the vernacular, there's suddenly a lot of senators out there who have seen the Lord. You find out that the senator from New Hampshire [Republican Kelly Ayotte] is in trouble; she voted no. I can name you four senators who called me and said, 'Jesus, I guess you were right -- maybe we can find some other way of doing this. Can we bring this back up?'" --Joe Biden trying to convince us that gun control is the only obvious answerDelusional: "The Affordable Care Act is bringing the cost of health care in our country down in both the public and private sector. And that is what is largely responsible for the deficit coming down." --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)Say what? "I had a friend who got married to the wrong person, just so she could have health insurance. So, we'll also have a lot of less bad marriages as a result of [ObamaCare]." --Rep. Janice Hahn (D-CA)Unbalanced: "[W]e [Democrats] worked very, very hard together in order to be able to put together a balanced budget that reflects the values of the American people, that's fair, that's balanced in values and approach as well as in numbers, and we did that." --Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) on the Senate's budget that never reaches balance

DezinformatsiaMedia cover: "I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On" --New York Times headline, obfuscating the issue"Look, if you play by the rules and if you do what you're supposed to do, an audit doesn't take very long. IRS agents are there for a reason. Am I defending the IRS? Yeah I am! ... So let's all get on board with the president who wants to simplify the tax code! ... I don't think the IRS ought to apologize for anything!" --MSNBC's Ed Schultz"Even when they have real evidence of misdeeds and malfeasance, conservatives still want to change the subject to the fake, ginned up scandal they've been pushing month after month." --MSNBC's Chris Hayes"Well, what difference will that make if the White House has already put out the talking points and said that they were written by the CIA with the input of other agencies?" --ABC's George Stephanopoulos echoing Hillary ClintonAlternate universe: "What's so sad about it is the president has been very rightfully proud of the lack of scandal in his administration so far." --Time magazine assistant managing editor Rana ForooharA stopped clock is right twice a day: "These have been a bad few months for journalism. We're getting the big stories wrong, over and over again." --CBS's Scott PelleyNewspulper Headlines:We Blame George W. Bush: "Carney: I.R.S. Run by Bush Political Appointee" --TheWeeklyStandard.comLongest Books Ever Written: "Why We Should Mistrust the Government" --RealClearPolitics.comLeave Her Alone, You Creeps!: "Benghazi Investigation Creeps Closer To Hillary Clinton" --BuzzFeed.comAnswers to Questions Nobody Is Asking: "Need a Mustache Transplant? Visit Turkey" --The Wall Street JournalNews You Can Use: "How to Lose a War" --Hoover Institution website(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto)Village IdiotsNon sequitur: "What [the] IRS did [was] dumb and wrong. [Important] to note [that] GOP groups flourished [the] last 2 elections, overwhelming Ds. And they will use this to raise more $." --tweet from former Obama campaign chief and adviser David Plouffe on the IRS targeting Tea Party and Patriot groupsDownplay the scandal: "Mistakes were made, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan motivation. ... There was a shortcut taken in our processes to determine which groups needed additional review. ... These are factually complex and sensitive cases, and it's challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare. ... We want to stress that our employees -- all career civil servants -- will continue to be guided by tax law and not by partisan issues." --IRS acting commissioner Steven T. MillerNothing to see here: "Those from the IRS that have spoken about this obviously have much greater insight into what took place than we do. ... One person's view of what actions were taken or what that individual did is not enough for us to say something concretely happened that was inappropriate." --White House Press Secretary Jay CarneySick blame-shifting: "Anti-choice politicians, and their unrelenting efforts to deny women access to safe and legal abortion care, will only drive more women to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell." --NARAL president Ilyse Hogue"This [Gosnell] case has made clear that we must have and enforce laws that protect access to safe and legal abortion, and we must reject misguided laws that would limit women's options and force them to seek treatment from criminals like Kermit Gosnell." --Planned Parenthood spokesman Eric Ferrero (The reality is that, for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, the key distinction is whether the atrocity occurred inside or outside the womb.)

Short Cuts"I was going to start off tonight with an Obama joke but I don't want to get audited by the IRS." --comedian Jay Leno"The best spin they have at their disposal is to argue that the President of the United States has to turn on the nightly news to find out what's happening [in] the government he runs." --columnist Guy Benson"At a press conference, Nancy Pelosi blamed the sequester for keeping her from visiting the troops on Mother's Day. Ironically, the troops credit the sequester for the same reason." --Fred Thompson"The White House was blasted for inaction during the Benghazi attack in House hearings. The terrorists overran the consulate then they overran the annex. So it does support Barack Obama's claim during the campaign that he's got al-Qaeda on the run." --comedian Argus Hamilton"Obama recently warned some college graduates against being all worried about government tyranny, and Obama has good reason to warn you against that because worrying about government tyranny is the exact sort of thing that will get you audited. Or, when Obamacare is in full force, it will be the attitude that gets you denied life saving health care. So have faith in government. Or it will get you." --humorist Frank J. FlemingSemper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team

Insight"When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself." --Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero (106-43 B.C.)The Gipper"For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?" --Ronald ReaganRe: The Left"[T]he best formula for failing to meet the standard of tolerance that leftists demand is to behave precisely as they do, not as they say. If, on the other hand, you truly want to live and let live -- as these sanctimonious scolds insist we do -- you must studiously observe their conduct and behave in exactly the opposite way. But from a leftist perspective, it's not enough for conservatives to peacefully coexist with liberals and let them do as they please. They are satisfied only if they browbeat dissenters into silence or social banishment. ... So it is that pro-abortion groups could not let stand an arrangement between the SFLA and the associate branch director of the Town Lake branch of the YMCA of Austin for the SFLA's use of the Y's showers for the week of the 'Students #Stand4Life Bus Tour.' ... Note that it wasn't that the pro-lifers were carrying placards into the showers or proselytizing recalcitrant pro-aborts while toweling off. It was the mere presence of pro-lifers, even if they were minding their own business, that the pro-abort bullies found intolerable. ... [A]ccording to the default liberal mindset ... you're not being unduly political if you support the correct causes. You're political only if you have the wrong views." --columnist David LimbaughPolitical Futures"In announcing his effort to make government smarter -- an idea with a very old pedigree -- Obama invoked two organizations he'd like government to emulate. The first was Google. ... [T]he second exemplar Obama offered for the sorts of best practices the government should adopt was his own presidential campaign. It was 'one of the most inclusive and most successful campaigns in American history,' he assured an audience largely comprised of his own White House staff. ... Google is a wonderful company, but Google is as relevant to the tasks of government as a garden rake is to the tasks of a surgeon. Similarly, a presidential campaign is a vital tool for electing a president. It is utterly useless for enforcing contracts or repelling foreign invaders. ... One of the advantages both a presidential campaign and a company like Google have is that they can fire incompetent employees quite easily. The federal government has no such luxury. According to a study by USA Today, death is the greatest threat to job security at the EPA, HUD and dozens of other agencies. ... The only people in the world who don't want the government to get much smarter are the ones working for it." --columnist Jonah GoldbergCulture"Have you noticed that the only area where our benevolent government does not seek to regulate ad infinitum is entertainment? There, the fewer rules and restrictions, the better. Indecency laws? Violation of the 1st Amendment. Violent lyrics and video games? Parents' discretion. Exposure of children to graphic sexual behavior at various Gay Pride events around the country each year? Necessary in order to produce tolerant citizens. But let that child try to sip from a Big Gulp while playing 'Grand Murder Spree 8' on their video game console and our loving leaders are forced to restrict consumption for the good of the child. Why? Because entertainment is the teat by which they control us. ... This would be inadvisable, if the goal was rearing a generation of stalwart men and women to lead this country. But that never has been the goal of our Dear Leaders ... Instead they seek to mire our youth in Never Never Land until their self-sufficiency has been degraded to the point of complete vacuity." --columnist Luke Hamilton

The Last Word"The civil rights movement in 20th century America attracted many people who put everything on the line for the sake of fighting against racial oppression. But the eventual success of that movement attracted opportunists, and even turned some idealists into opportunists. Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans. After the success of the civil rights insurgency, the latter have come into their own, gaining money, power and fame by promoting racial attitudes and actions that are counterproductive to the interests of those they lead. None of this is unique to blacks or to the United States. In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people -- and to hate those other people. ... Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having racial or ethnic leaders. While most Americans can easily name a number of black leaders, current or past, how many can name Asian American ethnic leaders or Jewish ethnic leaders? The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country." --economist Thomas Sowell

In early June of 2005, less than six months after he was sworn in as a U.S. Senator, Barack Obama spoke at a graduation ceremony at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. In his address, Obama defended the government’s role in creating and sustaining the middle class, themes he would later carry into two successful presidential campaigns. “Our economic dominance depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market,” he said. “But it also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together, and that everybody’s got a shot at opportunity.”

Obama returns today to the tiny liberal arts college for what the White House has billed as a major economic address. Knox has a special place in the President’s heart and in American history. “It’s the place where I gave my first big speech after I had been elected to the U.S. Senate,” Obama said at a recent event in Washington. Wednesday marks his third visit–once as a Senate candidate, once as a Senator and now as commander-in-chief–adding to a long history of presidents and political figures who have left a mark on the college.

I notice more and more Democratic pols using the *lip bite" façade when they are trying to emote. This was made popular when Clinton was pretending he was going through some sort of religious transformation during Lewinsky and his other sex scandals. I recently notice Bamster using this during his I could have been Travon speech.

I guess they fool some of the people all of the time with this stage manipulation of facial expressions.

A new poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal reveals that public perceptions about race relations in America have taken a devastating hit since the election of Barack Obama. At the beginning of the president’s first term, 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks had a positive view of American race relations. Those numbers have plummeted to 52 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 45 percent of whites now consider race relations fairly or very bad, compared with 20 percent in 2009, and the negative views held by black Americans has jumped from 30 percent to 58 percent. Thus, the idea that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a golden age of so-called post-racial relations has exploded. And the president and his administration bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for lighting the fuse.

The poll, conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies, has tracked Americans’ attitudes about race since 1994. And despite only a single poll question regarding the Zimmerman trial, which asked whether the outcome increased, decreased, or didn’t affect one’s confidence in the legal system, the steepest decline in positive views, and greatest increase in negative views, occurred in the last two years. That the timeframe largely coincides with the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy is likely no coincidence.

The Trayvon Martin case is one of the most visible examples of the Obama administration’s deliberate poisoning of race relations; all in coordination with the NAACP, the racial grievance industry and the corrupt leftist media. We now know that the administration had direct involvement in fanning the flames of racial discord that brought the case to the national stage. The Eric Holder-led Justice Department’s Community Relations Service (CRA) was sent to Sanford, FL to help set up meetings and organize protests. Among other services, the administration arranged an escort for college students participating in a 40-mile march to “demand justice” for Trayvon. When the situation erupted, Obama then famously took the racial motif national, saying, ”If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

Even after the jury rendered its not guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial, Obama, once again, injected himself into the case, this time noting that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” and launching into a lecture on race — despite the fact that a Martin family lawyer, Trayvon’s stepmother, the Sanford police, and an investigation conducted by the FBI all concluded the case had nothing to do with race.

However, well before the Trayvon Martin shooting, Obama made clear he would use the presidency to provide a platform for the race agitation industry. Prior to his election in 2008, the president sought to belittle small town “bitter clingers” who demonstrate “antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment[.]“ In July 2009, when black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in front of his Cambridge home after antagonizing police, Obama, despite admitting that he had not seen “all the facts,” still came to the conclusion that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly.” In a radio interview that aired on Univision in 2010, the president urged his Latino supporters to “punish our enemies and reward our friends,” in the upcoming election. That was the same year he made an unsubtle reference to Rosa Parks and segregation in order to belittle Republicans. “We don’t mind the Republicans joining us,” the president told supporters in Rhode Island. “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

At a January 2012 Washington fundraiser, the president made subtle references to the idea that if he weren’t reelected, minorities would be denied opportunities to pursue the American dream, while he implied Republicans would be the ones do the denying. “The notion that we’re all in this together, that we look out for one another–that’s at stake in this election,” he warned. “Don’t take my word for it. Watch some of these [Republican] debates that have been going on up in New Hampshire.” The following August in Colorado, Obama kept that meme alive, insisting that Republicans, “want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”

If such a divisive attitude were limited to the president himself, maybe race relations might not have soured as much as they have. Unfortunately, many members of his administration have also been more than willing to fan the flames of racial discord. Former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, who referred to Republicans as “assholes,” insisted that “white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities.” Addressing the annual NAACP convention in Orlando, FL on July 17, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius likened those who oppose ObamaCare to those who opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s, comparing the fight against them to “the fight against lynching and the fight for desegregation.” On August 14, 2012, Vice President Joe Biden told a largely black audience in Danville, Virginia, that Republicans wanted to “put y’all back in chains.” Former Assistant Attorney General and current Labor Secretary Thomas Perez viewed virtually every aspect of his former job through a racialist lens, from prosecuting banks for lending discrimination based on dubious “disparate impact” studies, to promoting the expansion of hate crimes prosecution, which he insisted was a largely white-on-black problem.

And then there is Eric Holder. Holder, who runs the most racially polarized Justice Department in modern history, wasted no time burnishing his racialist credentials, telling Americans soon after he was confirmed in 2009 that “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” In 2010, after being stonewalled by his own department, Christopher Coates, former voting chief for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, testified that Holder’s decision to drop an already-won voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party was due to “pressure” from the NAACP. Furthermore, he corroborated earlier testimony by J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ attorney, revealing that the DOJ cultivates a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act.

Holder also turned a blind eye when the Panthers offered a $10,000 bounty to capture George Zimmerman “dead or alive.” As for race-neutral enforcement of the the Voting Rights Act, as recently as yesterday Holder vowed to continue insisting that states “pre-clear” with the DOJ any changes to their voting laws. This represents nothing less than a determination to defy a recent Supreme Court ruling that effectively nullified his ability to do so. Texas is his current focus, but in a speech in Philadelphia, he promised that the decision to target the Lone Star State “will not be our last.” The motivation of this effort is clear: to portray red states and whites in general as abusive toward minority voters — as seeking to reinstitute “Jim Crow” through commonsense voter ID laws, as the Democratic Party propaganda goes.

This follows Holder’s decision to continue pursuing the possibility of civil rights charges against George Zimmerman, without a shred of evidence for doing so, making good on a promise he first made during an appearance at racial arsonist Al Sharpton’s National Action Network on April 11, 2012. After praising Sharpton “for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill,” Holder made his intentions clear. “If we find evidence of a potential federal criminal civil rights crime, we will take appropriate action,” he warned. To that end, Holder has set up ”tip lines” trolling for information he can use to prosecute Zimmerman. The “investigation” has now been ongoing for over a year.

The reason for fomenting this sort of racial animosity is transparently political. Just like in 2010, and 2012, Obama is determined to agitate and mobilize voters for the 2014 election and beyond and to weaken the Republicans with racial innuendo and accusations. He has tainted Democrats by presiding over the weakest recovery on record, one which is currently losing even more steam, with growth rates being revised downward, and one of the worst corporate revenue performances on record. The same is true of ObamaCare, which will be so damaging to Democrats that the administration unilaterally decided to postpone the employer mandate until 2015, usurping congressional authority in the process. This is to say nothing of Democrat-led foreign policy, with Egypt and Syria in free fall, Iraq and Afghanistan on the verge of reverting back to the failed states they were, Iran pursuing nuclear weapons absent any fear whatsoever, and both China and Russia signaling their intentions to fill the leadership vacuum the president’s “leading from behind” approach has produced.

Meanwhile, minority populations continue to suffer and grow disaffected under the reign of liberal policies. Majority-black Detroit is bankrupt. Chicago seethes with black-on-black gun crime, including 62 people wounded and 12 killed during the Fourth of July holiday weekend alone. Black unemployment is 13.7 percent, compared to 6.7 percent for the nation as a whole. The black American illegitimacy rate, one of the surest predictors of poverty, is approaching 75 percent.

Yet in his most recent speech on economics, Obama addresses none of these realities, preferring to blame the lot on Republicans (who have only ever controlled the House since 2008) and warning that if America fails to embrace his policies, “ocial tensions will rise as various groups fight to hold on to what they have, or start blaming somebody else for why their position isn’t improving.” In the Obama era, this should be interpreted as an ultimatum.

It’s going to be a long, divisive slog to the 2014 elections, and racial division continually promoted by the Obama administration is guaranteed to be an integral part of the mix. The fact that Americans view race relations as far worse than they’ve been in years should surely be an embarrassment for the first elected president of African descent. Odds are, however, he views it as an electoral boon for his party.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Feminists no longer supporting Weiner or Huma. Of course as long as they have another Democrat feminist alternative and they have made their political calculations that it is better for the Democrat party and to protect Hillary who may be harmed by association to Huma that Weiner is a liability. It is not about "women" bottom line:

*****Women's groups go on attack against Weiner

Hadley Malcolm reveals the woman who has come forward as one of Anthony Weiner's sexting partners.

Paul Singer, USA TODAY 12:28 p.m. EDT July 26, 2013

EMILY's List and National Organization for Women step up efforts on behalf of Christine QuinnQuinn would be first woman mayor of New York City

SHARE 3260 CONNECT 168 TWEET 132 COMMENTEMAILMORE

National women's groups are stepping up their efforts in the New York City mayors race to support City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and denounce former Congressman Anthony Weiner for his lewd online behavior.

The women's poliitcal group EMILY's List is sending out an e-mail to supporters Friday saying "New Yorkers deserve better than the circus their mayoral race has turned into." The e-mail, written by communications director Jess McIntosh, was sent under the subject line "I don't want to talk about Carlos Danger" - a reference to the pseudonym Weiner allegedly used for some of his on-line trysts.

Thursday the National Organization for Women hosted a rally with Quinn in New York and NOW President Terry O'Neill said "Mr. Weiner does have a problem and his behavior is sexist. Let's be clear: It is not respectful of women," according to the New York Daily News.

EMILY's list and the New York chapter of NOW had previously endorsed Quinn for the race, saying she is the most qualified candidate and hailing the historic possibility of election the first woman mayor of New York City.

Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW of New York City said Friday that Weiner has clearly demonstrated that he does not have the judgement or maturity to be mayor.

She added that the saga brings to mind Susan B. Anthony who spent decades crusading for women's right to vote. "She fought for our vote," Ossorio said, "and to think that a woman would squander their vote on someone like Anthony Weiner who doesn't take public office seriously, who is unfit and who has made a mockery of elected office, and who has done it by disrespecting woman . . . I feel embarrassed for our culture."

STORY: Weiner adds more detail to sexting story

Weiner resigned his seat in Congress in 2011 after it was revealed that he had sent lewd text messages and images to women on-line. This week he acknowledged that he had continued to engage in graphic on-line exchanges even after he left Congress. Thursday he said he may have exchanged texts with as many as ten women overall.

Weiner has rejected calls to quit the mayor's race, saying he believes New Yorkers are more interested in what he can do for the city than his boorish behavior, which he says is now behind him.****

Setting a Budget Trap for RepublicansObama is baiting the GOP to shut down the government in the fall.By KARL ROVE

Sometimes politicians, like magicians, use distraction. Take President Obama's latest pivot to the economy, which began with last week's speech in Illinois and concluded on Tuesday at an Amazon facility in Tennessee.

The pivot isn't about the economy. It's a setup for two budget battles with Congress this fall.

The first will be about funding the federal government for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Mr. Obama proposed the sequester, signed the July 2011 budget agreement with its hard caps on discretionary spending, and threatened to veto any attempt to repeal or mitigate it. Nevertheless, last week he attacked the sequester as "a meat clever" that "cost jobs" and later told the New York Times Sunday that he's worried about "the drop-off in government spending."

Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats want to spend $1.058 trillion in discretionary outlays next fiscal year—$91 billion more than allowed under the 2011 agreement. Republicans want to hold Mr. Obama to the $967 billion ceiling on discretionary spending in the coming fiscal year, a ceiling to which he agreed.

Spending disputes almost always work to the advantage of Republicans, since Americans believe there's plenty of waste in Washington. For example, a Feb. 18 Pew Research Center/USA Today poll found 54% felt that to reduce the deficit, the president and Congress should focus "mostly on spending cuts." Only 16% said the emphasis should be "mostly on tax increases." This was shortly after the Obama administration's dire (and false) warnings about the effects of the sequester on the economy.

The second battle will be over the debt ceiling—government's ability to borrow—that the Treasury Department says must be raised this fall, probably by November. Mr. Obama cautioned in his weekly address on Saturday against "threatening to default on the bills this country has already racked up."

Burnishing his credentials as a deficit hawk, Mr. Obama also claimed in his July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., that he's "cut the deficit by nearly half as a share of the economy." According to the Office of Management and Budget, the annual deficit has indeed fallen to 6% of GDP this fiscal year from 10.1% during Mr. Obama's first fiscal year.

But the deficit is still a larger share of the economy than in 62 of the last 68 years since World War II. And the Congressional Budget Office says deficits will bottom out in fiscal year 2015 and begin climbing again. All this means Republicans will insist on further spending restraint, especially on entitlements, as part of any debt-ceiling measure.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said this weekend the White House wouldn't negotiate with Congress on the debt ceiling but did not demand that Congress pass a "clean" debt ceiling without spending restrictions. This suggests Mr. Obama understands he may be stuck taking further spending restraint in return for an increase in the limit on federal borrowing.

He'll try finessing this with tantalizing offers that ultimately give him more money to spend. But the "grand bargain" he offered Tuesday won't win any Republican huzzahs. Simplifying the corporate tax code to generate more revenue for what Mr. Obama called "a significant investment" (read: large increases in government spending) is a nonstarter.

This is especially the case since federal outlays this fiscal year are equal to 22.7% of GDP, higher than in all but six of the last 68 years (with four of those six on Mr. Obama's watch). The president can forget the $1 trillion in new revenue Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid demanded last week to pay for new spending.

Both sides face challenges in these looming budget fights. For Mr. Obama, it's that his latest pivot to the economy won't work.

In a June 13 CNN/ORC poll, his approval numbers on handling the economy were anemic (42% approve, 57% disapprove) and even worse on handling the deficit (34% approve, 64% disapprove). Pushing for more spending won't win support among independents who will decide the 2014 midterms.

For congressional Republicans, the challenge is to keep the upper hand provided by their strategy of passing continuing resolutions at current levels to fund the government. They must not overreach. For it's an iron law that Republicans get blamed for any government shutdown, no matter who controls the White House or Congress.

So Mr. Obama is baiting Republicans to overplay their hand by forcing a government shutdown or failing to offer a constructive conservative agenda. He must change the dynamic, or face Republican control of the House and Senate his last two years in office. No distraction can hide the president's concern about that.

Mr. Rove, a former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, helped organize the political action committee American Crossroads.

I lost all respect for Karl Rove during the last election cycle. He is an inside-the-beltway establishment Republican who just wants to get along with the Democrats and play an idiotic "strategic" game instead of taking a hard stand. Back in 1976 the Republican Party found itself in the same predicament, and Ronald Reagan made his famous "Bold Colors, not Pale Pastels" speech, in which he argued - as Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are now - that Republicans MUST take bold stands as the party of liberty, limited government, and personal responsibility. I can't believe this is even a discussion within the Republican Party at this point. Any Republican who refuses to sign on to Mike Lee's pledge and/or defund Obamacare at this juncture is a coward. HOW can anyone describe the Republican Party as an opposition party over the last few years? They failed to learn anything from their victory in the 2010 election. I will have ZERO use for any Republican who doesn't vote to defund this monstrosity, and will work as hard as I can to unseat them.

With our republic hanging by a thread, this is NOT the time for capitulation. I and millions of other conservatives are sick and tired of this behavior on the part of the vast majority of the Republicans in Congress. If they won't take a hard stand on this, they are utterly worthless and must be replaced with tea party-minded conservatives. Now is the time for every freedom-loving American to hound their Congressional reps mercilessly to sign on to the Mike Lee pledge. One phone call a day ought to be the minimum they get from each of us now that they are returning home to their districts. I can tell you that mine and most others in GA are hopping mad over this.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

The Democrats should try to hang onto these members who put common sense above mindless ideology. I will hazard a guess that it has been a long time since Dr. Hanson called himself a California Democrat.

I have called Walter Russell Mead my favorite Democrat; I will have to move VDH onto that list.

Many prominent conservatives come to their views by way of the Democrat party. Jeanne Kirkpatrick never renounced that side, just joined up with Reagan, Kemp, Bennett and others on certain issues. Rick Perry was a Dem (in Texas). Reagan was a Democrat - and a union leader. Crafty Dog admits coming from liberalism, somewhere in his formative youth...(??) I also remember when Dr. CCP was a middle of the road moderate!

In my family, people choose either side. The last time they thought Democrats were better, my grandfather voted for Woodrow Wilson. He soon regretted it and learned from the mistake.